I attempted the making of cake pops for Aiden’s birthday back in May. I had some leftover cake bits that I stored in the freezer. Wait–let me back up. I made a cake for Simon’s birthday that required me to cut away parts of it and arrange them in some sort of special configuration. For the life of me I can’t remember what kind of cake it was but I ended up with a ziploc bag full of cake parts that I decided I would save for later and try to make cake pops with them. The cake pops I tried to make were the ones where you crumble up the cake and mix it with frosting. Then you form balls out of the cake mixture, dip them in chocolate coating with lollipop sticks and voilá!

Unfortunately, those cake pops turned out to be the messiest, ugliest disaster I’ve ever attempted (aside from the literal train wreck of a cake that I made for Timothy–but that’s another story). The cake balls wouldn’t stay on the lollipop sticks and the chocolate coating made them so heavy that they started falling off even after trying to put them in the freezer to make them stay. Long story short: I vowed never to try cake pops again.

Mom Central and Babycakes sent me a Cake Pop Maker to try. I was excited not only because my first cake pop experience was a flop but because the Babycakes Cake Pop Maker claimed to bake the cake pops in minutes. Minutes!

The Cake Pop Maker comes with everything you need–the maker, lollipop sticks, a little two-pronged fork to remove the cake balls from the maker, a stand to hold the cake pops for decorating, and a recipe book for cake pops and donut holes. We chose to try the Lemon Cake Pops since my favorite cake in the world is lemon cake. Don’t get me wrong–I like a good chocolate cake but whenever there is a choice between the two at the church Wednesday night supper, you can bet I’m going to choose the lemon cake.

My family all worked together to create the cake pops. Simon helped by pouring the flour mixture into the mixer while I scraped the bowl. After that, the boys helped by constantly running into the kitchen to ask when they were going to be ready. Once the batter was done, I had to spoon it into the little holes in the Cake Pop Maker. The directions recommended using a pastry bag or a ziploc bag with the corner snipped off. At the time, we didn’t have any ziploc bags because the entire box magically disappeared and not one of the children knew what happened to it. I will say that I wished for a bag because spooning the batter into the reservoirs was a tricky task.

Nonetheless, it took five minutes for the cake pops to bake and removing them with the provided fork was super easy. I’d say it took about fifteen minutes to bake 18 cake pops from start to finish. We let them cool then put them in the freezer as directed. While they were chillin’ in the freezer, Jamie was preparing the icing from the recipe provided in the cookbook. It was a team effort to dip the cake pops in the icing and place them in the stand, but I must say it was WAY easier than the first pops we tried to make.

The only thing I was disappointed about was the fact that we only got one cake pop stand and it holds 12 cake pops. The recipes make more than a dozen so we had to use a piece of Styrofoam to hold the extras. I would have liked to have at least one more stand come with the cake pop maker. We don’t usually have a foam block sitting around so we used one that came in the Cake Pop Maker box. It did the job, though.

You can see that the cake pops are colored a little differently. The bottoms of the cake balls are darker so they have this two-toned look. If we used a chocolate coating or one that isn’t transparent like the lemon icing was, the coloring of the cake pops would be unnoticeable. It didn’t matter. Those cake pops were freakin’ delicious and were eaten up by our family in a matter of days. It was hard not to eat just one at a time.

I’m planning to make cake pops for Corey’s birthday party next week. He has requested chocolate with sprinkles so wish me luck!

I wrote this review while participating in a campaign by Mom Central Consulting on behalf of Babycakes and received a product sample and a promotional item to thank me for taking the time to participate.